Research Grants

The PEDL Competitive Research Grants Programme comprises Major Research Grants and smaller Exploratory Grants. Grants will be awarded on a competitive basis, with applications solicited from researchers throughout the world.

PEDL will give particular encouragement to proposals which address three cross-cutting issues:

Fragile and conflict affected states: The importance of the interaction between growth and conflict provides a very compelling case for supporting research in this area. A critical bottleneck to research on firms in conflict-ridden areas is the availability of data. But if researchers are able to overcome this issue, there is tremendous potential for research on private enterprise development in conflict-ridden states.

Gender: For proposals for research on issues that operate at the level of the enterprise, PEDL will encourage proposals which take into account differences in gender.

Unlocking data for understanding markets and firms: A key to drawing new researchers into topics of private sector development in LICs is making relevant data more widely available. Of course, the data generated by any project must be made available to other researchers to the extent allowed by confidentiality or purchase agreements. But data generated by projects are not all equal in this regard. Where researchers can make a case that the data generated by their project is likely to be of particular interest to other researchers, we will consider providing additional funding to allow the researchers to make the data more accessible to the research community.

Exploratory grants

Exploratory Grants are research grants of between £10K and £40K that are designed to allow researchers to:

explore new approaches to the study of firms in low-income countries (LICs); and

to develop new (or build on) existing sources of data on firms in LICs.

Proposals for Exploratory Grants can be submitted at any time.

For more information on these grants, including information on submitting a proposal, please visit the Exploratory Grants page.

Major Research Grants

In this round we plan to award at least 6 Major Grant awards, with an average grant size of £300,000. Note however that whilst there is a lower limit of £100,000 for each Major Grant, there is no upper limit. Cost effectiveness and value for money will also be important evaluation criteria. These are designed to provide research assistance, data collection and surveys in low-income countries, and teaching buyouts for the principal investigator.

The fifth call for proposals will close on October 2nd, 2017. Please click here for more information about the fifth call.

** Please note that an important criteria for funding of proposals is the relevance to policy in Low-Income Countries and other elegible countries as defined by the PEDL Programme. See the list of the priority countries here. Additional information available our FAQ pages.